


Somewhere Warmer

by Indarkstars



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, F/M, M/M, Murder, Past Child Abuse, Physical Abuse, Single Parents, Trans Character, Trans child
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 10:12:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18938851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indarkstars/pseuds/Indarkstars
Summary: Michael Guerin's been east of the Mississippi since he was eight years old.Single Parent AU





	Somewhere Warmer

Michael doesn’t slam the truck door closed but he wants to. He wants to slam it so badly it physically pains him, causing him to curl his fist and feel once again the way its badly healed bones shift and grind against one another. Ten feet away his childhood house stands like a grave site, pillars leaning towards each other and moldering with desperate need of support but getting none.

Even the supports know there’s no help left, especially not tonight. But the windows are dark and all Michael can hear is the rustle of long strips of white paint pulling against old wood.

 _Rotten,_ he thinks and wants again to slam the door, rev the engine, and shoot forward into the night and the late November slush that's already sopped the hills of Appalachia.  

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he breathes slow and even as he carefully shuts the passenger side door. Quiet. Almost silent. He sees blond curls shift under a blue blanket and lets out a careful breath as everything stills.

It's two am.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gregory, defacto father and a failure at that, had scoffed that night, “You barely got through school and now you’re, what? Going to throw it away?”

Michael had stared, dangling a fork on his fingers while the rest of the table waited. “What do you expect me to do?”

“Leave her here. We can take care of her.”

 _Like you did me?_ he didn’t ask because that anger came later with inwardly focused frustration close on its heels. Why had he returned, again? Hadn’t he promised himself at eighteen he’d never come back? He knew better.  _He knew better._

“I don’t want to stay,” Maisie had said, very clearly. He folded his hands on the table in front of the ‘good china’ plates that had been laid out for dinner. At six he was already better at stating boundaries then Michael was at twenty-eight.

And wasn’t that fucking depressing? Wasn’t that how they both had ended up in this drafty old dining room eating dry turkey and disappointment.

“Don’t worry, baby.” Marjorie patted Maisie’s hand, couldn’t seem to grasp pronouns or explanations--but this was mountain country. At least Marjorie was kinder about it then Gregory opting for  _baby, sweetheart, darling_ \--which weren’t gender neutral except when they were. “We’ll sort it out.”

She was so good at smoothing things over when she wanted to be. Or maybe she was just good at sensing weakness.

“He’s really settled down,” Marjorie had whispered into the phone just six days prior and Michael had remembered in that quiet moments when her papery hands touched his and her cool, thin, mouth touched his cheek. That day he had been standing in a puddle caused by a busted pipe, an eviction notice in hand, and couldn’t help the hope and sheer loneliness that bubbled tepid at her offer. “It’s gonna be Thanksgiving. Let us take a little of it, okay?”

“Just Thanksgiving?”

He had forgotten the hundreds of broken promises.“Just Thanksgiving.”

He had thought he was the only one in danger.

But nothing was ever ‘just’ anything with Gregory.

 

* * *

 

Michael climbs into the driver's seat and sits, just staring out at the house and breathing until his breath comes out as fog and sniffles rise from the next seat over. “It's okay, darling, okay.”

He doesn’t turn the engine over. He doesn't have to to take off the break. Instead, he keeps the keys in his lap, releases the break, and waits.

And waits.

Waits.

They don’t move and Michael can  _see_ what is going to happen next. He’s going to turn the engine, his lights will flash into the master bedroom, and Gregory is going to drag him by the belt loops from the truck. Sometime around then, or just after, Maisie will start screaming.

Marjorie will try to sush him. Maybe she’ll pull the kid deep inside the house, into the ‘secret’ second kitchen in the basement where they can’t hear anything going on outside. Maybe she’ll make Masie hot chocolate with tepid water and no marshmallows.

“A treat for a treat,” she’ll offer because she always found something to give after Gregory lost it.

Maisie won't stand for it. He hasn't shown any inclination to bow since he was born three weeks early and screaming like a banshee. It's just like Maisie's mom, really, and damn does Michael miss her.

The sad thing is, this is Michael's hopeful version of what might happen next. He doesn't want to think about the other probable outcome. Maybe he can push the car instead? His control sucks, his telekine-bullshit-sis was always more of an emotional reaction than anything else, so he’d have to get Maisie out of the car first but…

His hand is on the door handle, his feet half ready to hit dirt road again when the car finally seems to realize it’s free to follow gravity and begins to roll.

“Thank you,” he whispers. The gravel crackles under the wheels as he turns the truck away from the house and into the long winding driveway. Above them, bare trees shake with cold against a starless sky. Beside them, a broken lantern on a metal shepherds crook passes by. If they can just reach the rusted-out tractor he can turn the truck on properly.  “Thank you. Thank you.”

If they can only… if they can only...

And then the front light turns on, throwing a glare over Michael and Maisie's tarp-wrapped belongings tied to the bed of the truck and brightening the cockpit. Maisie grunts, frowning, and Michael can't turn the key in the ignition fast enough. This good old truck, the truck that helped him escape this house the first time around and rabble-roused through mudholes and trash hauls all throughout college and beyond, sputters, turns over, chokes.

 

* * *

 

The passenger-side door hasn't locked in three years, not since Tommy spilled neon green slushy all over it, so Michael doesn't try to stop Gregory. Gregory didn't bother to put a shirt on and he's already moving faster than the car. Michael closes his eyes, just one moment, and then jerks the breaks on, letting them scream for him and jarring Maisie into sudden, awful, wakefulness.

"Dad!" His hands claw out of the blankets to brace against the dash. "How'd we… what…"

"You stay in the car," Michael barks.

Gregory is already at the window, ripping open the door. "Sneaking out at night? Really?"

"Don't you do anything, Maisie, I mean it."

"But-- _Dad!_ "

Michael is six and sixteen again--the old man grabs the back of his flannel shirt and the edges of his mop of hair and drags him bodily from the cockpit, scraping his boots in the dirt before Michael can catch his footing. There's something deep inside that whispers to him,  _be still_ , be unremarkable but he's not sure if that's a memory or just a learned reaction from every attempt to beat or unburden the wonderful from him.

"If you're going to act like an ungrateful child I'm going to treat you like one."

A palm cracks his cheek and it almost makes him laugh--open and instead of a fist? But then there's a knee in his stomach and what might have laughter lightens to a wheeze.

"We have someplace to be." Michael grinds the words out, arm around his middle, and he peeks up tentatively and sees that Maisie's stocking feet have moved to the driver's seat.

"Bulltshit."

It's then that Marjorie comes simpering out in fuzzy slippers and a plain white nightgown. She places her hands on her husband's arm like that same hand hasn't been brandished against her time and time again. "Gregory, what's going on? Michael--Michael had to leave, that's all."

"Before service on Saturday, of course," Gregory says it like a curse and a damning and Michael knows it’s both of those things. "Go get a belt, Marjorie."

"I am not a child anymore. Maisie and I are leaving." Michael takes a step back, closer to the car.

Marjorie stills, somewhere between the house and the fight. Gregory laughs. "You're not fit to raise her."

"Yeah? Are  _you_ really the one to give  _me_ parenting advice?"

The wrong thing to say. It was the wrong thing to say and Michael knew it--he just couldn't keep his damned mouth shut. Some things never changed.

Gregory grabs him, then grabs the metal shepherd's crook, leaving the shitty little lantern to crack against the ground. Michael jerks away, shoving his palm so hard onto Gregory's bare shoulder that he's surprised the man doesn't jerk back. Michael's heart is racing and something inside him is building, building, building. It frightens him, it should frighten Marjorie and Gregory because after all their attempts to pray it out and beat it out--it's still there. This  _something terrible_ that his adopted parents felt a calling to try and remove from him.

 _I know you're a good boy, deep inside_ , Marjorie told him over and over, stroking his hair when he cried.  _You just have to let go of the awfulness._

But the awfulness was Michael--until Lilia had looked at him and said otherwise and then made it otherwise with him and Maisie for five brilliant years.

"Gregory…"

There's nowhere to run except maybe the car and how long would the windows hold out? How long until Gregory just grabbed his child and…

Two things happen at the same time. His hand shoving Gregory's chest starts to glow and then, Maisie slams into Michael's side with his little hands outstretched and a shrieking, "No!"

Suddenly it doesn't matter if Michael was grabbing Gregory or if Gregory was grabbing Michael--because Gregory's being shoved away, tipping backward, possibly slamming his head against the ground before falling into a roll on the slushy ground.

"Fuck," Michael says and stands there, hearing the soft  _oof_ of his adopted father coming to rest. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he thinks he can feel it--the  _surprise, pain, fear_ of the moment before everything goes dark. Marjorie, still standing by the house, is still, too.

And then Maisie starts to sniffle, then cry, big fat tears that Michael can instantly feel soaking his shirt.

"Shit, shit, shit." Michael drags Maisie up by the armpits, bracing his child against his hip for half a second like Maisie is two again instead of first-grade material. "Are you okay?"

Bloody nose. Bloody nose but fine. He shoves Maisie into the passenger seat by way of the driver's and slams the door behind them both. This time, when Michael turns the key the truck purs to life. He hits the gas, tries not to look back at the still body half hidden in the grass or the way Marjorie leans over it and wails.

 

* * *

 

"I'm sorry." Maisie's voice is small and quiet, buried under the blanket Michael might have stolen from his parents.

"You have nothing to be sorry for."

"But you said--"

"You did nothing wrong." If anyone's done something wrong it's Michael. Michael who  _knew better_ than to go back there but still wanting to finally find family waiting for him. "Try to sleep a little, okay? You'll feel better."

Michael isn't sure he ever will, but it was his fault--not Maisie's.

 

* * *

 

Michael doesn't sleep. Not even when he pulls into a Waffle House parking lot four hours later and then idles for ten minutes before he remembers he should shut the car down at least. His body feels like a live wire--jittery and tense, thrumming with the worries he can do nothing about. By the time Maisie wakes by his own devices, Michael's hands have settled at his sides and he might have drooled a little--but he didn't sleep.

"Dad," Maisie says and Michael notices the sun peeking behind Maisie's head. It sets his hair alight, brightens the gray-blue of his eyes. Michael loves him. "Breakfast?"

They've had enough late night-early morning Wafflehouse runs that Maisie is more than prepared with both of their orders. He gets a waffle with chocolate milk. Michael gets hash browns scattered and smothered, covered, chunked, and peppered.

When he's almost full and Maisie is mostly playing with his food rather than eating it, Michael sops up syrup from one pudgy cheek with a napkin and asks, “What do you think about going somewhere warmer?”

“Where?”

“I dunno. West?”

There’s a map in his mind and it screams of the stars and whispers like a heartbeat:  _west, go west, go west_. When he was younger, before he went to university, before he met Maisie’s mother and lost her, before Maisie was at all, Michael had to decide which instruction to follow first.

 _Stars_ or  _West_. He had chosen stars. It had been the best excuse to get out of the house.

But now, with two funerals, a possible murder charge, and an eviction notice, there’s no reason not to try the other half. He can drive all them all the way west to California if he wants. Or at least he can until he runs out of money and credit cards.

Unless Maisie doesn’t want to go.

But Maisie nods, spearing up another bit of waffle and popping it into his mouth. “West. Okay. I'm still going to first grade, though.”

“Yeah,” Michael smiles and knows it's his first smile in days. “You'll be the best first grader in California.”

But they don't stop in California. They stop just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

**Author's Note:**

> link to [tumblr](https://indarkstars.tumblr.com/post/185098510390/somewhere-warmer-pt-1)


End file.
